


just surrender and it won't hurt at all

by flootzavut



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Blanket Permission, Doubt, Episode: s01e03 Hard Times, Ficlet, GNU Terry Pratchett, M/M, Pining, Realisation of feelings, Romance, TV Canon, achy breaky hearts, all that good shit, queer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 09:58:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19423648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flootzavut/pseuds/flootzavut
Summary: "He's a being of love - it's practically in his job description to love everyone and everything. What kind of angel would he be if he didn't?"





	just surrender and it won't hurt at all

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alleyesonthehindenburg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alleyesonthehindenburg/gifts).



> Title from "Hammer To Fall" - by Queen, natch.
> 
> Very much show-canon compliant, but I can't really detangle them from one another in my head.

* * *

**_just surrender and it won't hurt at all_ **

* * *

The love Aziraphale has for creation as a whole is vast. It encompasses everything from the Milky Way to a ladybird on a blade of grass, from the sun to the tower blocks of London - everything. He's a being of love - it's practically in his job description to love everyone and everything. What kind of angel would he be if he didn't?

(All right, so some things are much easier to love than others. Politicians, he struggles with. His fellow angels try his patience more often than not. But he does his best; he may not _like_ everything and everyone, but he tries to love them anyway.)

So. Love. It's who he is and what he does, and if he didn't love everybody, then he would probably get in trouble. So it isn't strictly speaking _his fault_ if he comes to love the things (or people) heaven didn't necessarily have in mind when they gave him his raison d'être. Right?

It's a question he'd rather not ask himself, but sometimes he simply can't _help_ it. What if he loves the wrong things? What if the humans are right, that there are people God does not love, and whom Aziraphale should _know_ not to love, if he were a proper angel, if he were better at his job?

What about demons?

(What about, when he gets right down to brass tacks, Crowley?)

* * *

He's loved Crowley from the start. He thought he was supposed to. Fallen or not, Crowley is one of God's beloved, and so Aziraphale needed to love him, too. It seemed quite simple.

That didn't mean he needed to like Crowley (although he did), or that he should help Crowley (though he did that, too). It just meant that he should be an example of God's love. Maybe a demon could be redeemed - God moves in mysterious ways, after all. Aziraphale didn't need to understand the ineffable plan. (Often, he really doesn't understand it at all.)

He's an angel, and it's not his place to ask questions. (That sort of thing just gets one into trouble.)

So, loving Crowley really should be - not easy exactly, but uncomplicated. And for a long time, it is. Crowley is part of creation, and Aziraphale was made to love that creation, so of course he loves Crowley, year after year, century after century.

Then, in the ruins of a small London church, Crowley hands him a bag of books, and the bottom falls out of his world.

* * *

He's been ignoring it for millennia, but he can't any more. He loves all of creation, but the love he has for Crowley is smaller in a way that makes it much bigger. It's specific and focused and so much more... _personal_.

Aziraphale isn't the greatest student of humanity and human nature (the poor dears make their short lives so terribly _complicated_ ), and besides, he doesn't like thinking about things that make him uncomfortable, but he's aware there's a phrase humans use which seems to fit. He can't admit it to himself, but after the church, every time he hears or reads those words, an odd tingle of awareness shivers down his spine and over his wings.

_In love_.

Such a very human emotion, a very human experience. Not angelic at all, but earthly and visceral. Prone to lead to - well, things that happen in the dark, hot and sticky and messy.

(Aziraphale doesn't want that. He can't want that. It wouldn't be... proper.)

So then. He loves Crowley. He... cares for Crowley. Anything more simply isn't acceptable.

( _You go too fast for me, Crowley_ , he says, years later, telling himself the way Crowley's face crumples around the edges is nothing, means nothing. Telling himself that even if it means something, it doesn't matter, because it wouldn't be right.)

Angels love. It's what they're meant to do.

But they aren't ever meant to fall.

_~ fin ~_


End file.
